Vice-Chair, Mentorship, Equity & Diversity

The Mentorship, Equity and Diversity portfolio was established in November 2015 to support the recruitment and retention of our excellent faculty through mentorship, increasing faculty diversity to reflect our population, and ensuring a safe and professional work environment. We outline below some key themes of activity that we propose to conduct over the next five years, aligned with the strategic plan of our department, to ensure our faculty members will thrive personally and professionally.

Based on surveys of our department, we know that approximately 50% of our faculty members have a formal mentor. Great strides have been made in ensuring that mentors are identified for new faculty and we would like to see these efforts extended to all faculty, thereby ensuring good mentorship is received by our members across their careers. With support from our Chair, we will be developing the role of mentorship facilitators, appointed within each division to facilitate identification of mentors for faculty and support the mentoring relationships. We will also be launching regular mentorship workshops starting with the new faculty (including mentors and mentees) but extending to all faculty members over the next five years. We are also committed to evaluating the mentorship program through qualitative and quantitative methods.

We want to ensure our department reflects our population and promotes equity. As a starting point for these efforts, we are developing a scholarly approach to understand this issue through data gathering across our department and a knowledge synthesis on interventions to promote gender equity. These efforts will inform the development of an intervention to promote gender equity that we will then implement and evaluate across our Department.

Promoting professionalism and maintaining a safe environment for our trainees and faculty members are key tenets of our department. As such, we are completing some work to understand experiences of faculty members and will also be conducting a knowledge synthesis on interventions to promote professionalism and prevent bullying.

We invite department members to engage with us on these scholarly activities so that we can work together to ensure our department remains a supportive environment for faculty. If there is anyone interested in being involved with any of this work, including any related research please email us.